On the one hand I definitely understand your argument, and its one Ive basically accepted as reasonable my entire life including when I was practicing Catholicism a long time ago as a kid.
However, in thinking about what you wrote I do question if there isnt a logical consistency in the idea that if there was no confessional seal that people who do the most heinous things would not repent.
I suppose its plausible that a child abuser wouldnt go to confess that if they knew the priest had to pass that information along, however I think the logical inconsistency is that they would then be at risk of dying without having confessed such a grave sin. Which hypothetically if they were a true believer of what the church teaches would be worse than any earthly punishment imaginable.
Now, if they simply didnt confess it to avoid prosecution then one might argue that they dont actually hold sincere beliefs and that the same person was simply using religion as a means to access and abuse kids. If they dont hold sincere beliefs then legally speaking they receive no protection under the law
The other thing is that is must be psychologically tormenting to some degree for priests to know other people are heinous criminals and being powerless to stop them other than saying “turn yourself in”.
I dont want priests to turn into some kind of reporters of all things to the authorities, but child abuse is among the most gravely disgusting things a person can do, universally, and given the problem of abusers in the church I think it would be great if priests were authorized to report it. Among the other most heinous of crimes like murder and rape and whatnot. Not “I cheated on my taxes” but shit that evidences a clearly dangerous person to others. We should be putting the rights of children and adults to be safe from that shit above the religious “right” of some random person to not be tattled on when they literally did something so awful.
Really if anything I imagine that the church making a big show of cleansing itself of pedophiles would actually be one of the few things that could bring a lot of people into the church. But I have no skin in that game, I just want to see pedophiles get their due comeuppance
Of course not everyone is that way! Personally when I speak Spanish I sound nothing like when I speak English, and if anything my accent more closely follows the accent of whoever taught me the word, plus probably some of just my own inflection added in (but not in the accent of my English).
It makes sense to me that if you learned Spanish in Colombia that you could sound Argentinian based on your Colombian learning plus your own inflection. It would make sense for it to sound like a different South American accent.
My Spanish is kind of jumbled between Northern Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Venezuelan Spanish all being fairly diverse from each other, and thus getting very different lessons from different native speakers lol
Its just fascinating to me that some people dont and some do take on inflections that match how they speak their native language. I imagine it has something to do with how the information is stored in the brain. Perhaps those of us that tend to pick up accents and inflections better as adults still have some neural plasticity or strength in the areas that we use to develop a native language